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Note: The Needle of the Italian Compass
Tag(s): Italy, Medici
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Mismanagement and excessive loans to King Edward IV during the Wars of the Roses put an end to the
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London branch; the Bruges branch also collapsed; so did the branch in Milan, where the premises which Francesco Sforza had given to Cosimo were sold to Lodovico il Moro. The branches in Lyons, Rome and Naples were all in difficulties, the result partly of managerial incompetence, partly of that general collapse in Florentine banking which
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So it was agreed that a deputation comprising members of leading Florentine families would go to Rome, make vague apologies for the city’s misbehaviour and, in return, receive His Holiness’s forgiveness.
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Twice war broke out; and twice Lorenzo’s personal intervention brought peace. On the second occasion, in August 1484, when the Pope’s representative returned to Rome to report that the terms of the peace treaty denied his nephew the towns of Cervia and Ravenna for which the war had been fought, Sixtus, already excessively ill-tempered because of his gout, was at first so angry that he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such humiliating terms. The next day he collapsed, and within a few hours was dead.
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Innocent was gratified by Lorenzo’s attentions and convinced by his arguments; he recognized in Lorenzo a man whom he could trust. So completely, indeed, did he come to share his opinions that, as the disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador put it, ‘the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo’.
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The Pope was delighted. Lorenzo’s hold on him was confirmed and tightened, and it was now accepted throughout Europe that the policies of the Curia were in future to be directed by Florence, that, as in the time of Cosimo, a Medici was once again to be the virtual arbiter of Italian policy.
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Yet in his own lifetime Lorenzo’s high standing as a statesman was rarely questioned: he was ‘the needle of the Italian compass’. In Florence he won immensely enhanced credit by finding plausible excuses to relieve the Genoese of the city of Pietrasanta and to retake from them the fortress of Sarzana, thus finally atoning for the humiliations suffered during the course of the War of the Pazzi Conspiracy.
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